This political spat with Russia has got me thinking. At first I was so annoyed by their infuriating posturing that I was all for going to war straight away. But then I realised that although they are drunk and useless we could never win a war against them because they can also be cunning and dogged when the mood takes them. So we can’t win a war against Russia, and of course as we know Russia couldn’t win their war against the Taliban, so doesn’t that prove that we can’t win a war against the Taliban? It’s logic, pure and simple. So who can we beat? Well, we sort of beat Germany before and they beat Poland before that, so maybe we should try invading Poland instead of Afghanistan, or Slovakia, which is now even smaller than it was when it was Czechoslovakia. Now if only there was a reason, it doesn’t have to be a good one…
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For the last couple of days I’ve been installing a soundtrack I wrote, Signalnet, for a performance of the Stan’s Cafe show Of All The People In All The World. It’s in a theatre, more like a giant arts centre, in Angers which is a small city in The Loire Valley in France. Le Quai opened just a few weeks ago and it is beautifully designed and a pleasure to work in. Their web site is nearly as clumsily designed as the theatre is elegant, and I’ve heard that the backstage offices aren’t big enough but it is still an extremely impressive venue.
This soundtrack is usually pre-recorded, played from a ten hour 5-channel DVD. The reason I’ve come out is that we’re trying a new experiment with this installation. Much of the communication between the performers during the show is being recorded, uploaded and added to an RSS feed which you can listen to virtually in real time. I have never heard of anyone trying this before and so far it is working perfectly. Yesterday evening we had a preview performance for invited guests, today we open to the public at 1330 GMT. There a site at www.radiorice.com with links to the feed and information about it plus a player you can download. Have a listen, let me know what you think.
I just got a letter from Land-Rover:
Dear Mr Ward, In view of recent events in the news, I’m writing to apologise in case you received a mailing about Range Rover Sport that could have caused concern.
It was a slim box with a flashing green light. Although marked as originating from Land Rover and clearly labelled as a marketing communication, we realised that in the current climate of heightened security, an electronic device like this could have aroused suspicion at first glance. We stopped the mailing as soon as we could, but some had already been sent.
It was never our intention that the mailing should cause any anxiety, so please accept my apologies if it did. If you have any concerns or questions at all, please don’t hesitate to call us free on 0800 *** ***.
So SUVs aren’t just a security concern when they’re full of burning doctors, they can also cause problems when the idiots from marketing get their hands on them. Come on Gordon, let’s ban the obnoxious things.
Back in the last century the IRA, a small militant republican movement from Northern Ireland undertook a bombing campaign in London. As I say, they were a small organisation with scant resources but even so they managed to carry out a large number of spectacular and disruptive attacks while killing relatively few people. Judging by the very informative timeline of London bombings over at NPR there were 29 attacks between 1971 and 2001, an average of about one a year, causing millions of pounds worth of damage and huge disruption but only murdering 27 people in the process.
In this century we have Al-Qaeda who, we are told, are a global ‘terror network’ with access to unlimited funding, training and equipment. We are shown videos of masked men in secret training camps doing karate chops in balaclava helmets and clambering under barbed wire dressed as Rambo. They aren’t ‘nice’ like the IRA, they don’t give warnings. They have learned to make ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ in Iraq, they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan but now the three countries they hate the most in the world are Israel, the US and Britain. Surely we are doomed.
They have had their successes: In the US in 2001, in Spain in 2004 and in London in 2005 but their failures have been so useless and embarrassing. The shoe bomber, the castor oil poisoners, the chapati flour and hair dye bombers and now the Camping Gaz and petrol drive-by bombings. It’s like being attacked by ten year olds from a rough estate who’ve got their hands on The Anarchist Cookbook. We shouldn’t raise the threat alert to maximum, we should ignore them, like spam or graffiti. They’re hopeless, ignorant, sexually frustrated losers who think that if they nick an SUV and burn it out in Glasgow airport instead of in some car park somewhere they’ll get more attention and unfortunately they’re right. What they’re not is members of some shadowy international ‘terrorist’ organisation. No way.
Every now and then I hear people saying that they’re scared to cycle in London. There’s no reason to be scared, it’s easy if you follow these simple tips.
- Car drivers may seem to be scum but that’s because you’re thinking of them as people. When a person gets behind a steering wheel they stop being human so don’t act all surprised or angry when they behave like a moron. It’s your job to anticipate and prevent their stupid behaviour. Don’t bother shouting or getting all het up, they will never improve. Just accept them for what they are.
- Wear an iPod. If you’re using the standard ear buds they won’t block out enough road noise to make things any more dangerous but they will discourage other road users from talking/shouting at you because they will think that you can’t hear them. Music will also make your ride a great deal more enjoyable.
- Stop at every red light. As a good middle class man/woman it’s your responsibility to set a good example to those people who may not properly understand the rules of the road. People who jump the lights deserve to be run over.
- Keep at least a metre of space to your left. Force cars to make a positive decision to over-take you otherwise they’ll just try and squeeze past. If a car does get too close to you then ride further out in the road otherwise it will just happen again.
- Try not to let busses get in front of you, they’ll just leave you no room at the next junction.
- Be cool, you’re the winner, you don’t have anything to prove.
When I decided to move my sites to a US based web host I felt a little guilty and slightly apprehensive. With so many friends working in new media I wanted to shop locally but there was simply no comparable product available at anything near the same price. Then there was the support issue. People warned me that it might be difficult getting help when I was trying to solve problems with people five thousand miles away on an eight hour time difference.
The web host I chose, I won’t mention their name for reasons I’ll explain later, has been great for the last nine months. Their servers have been up all the time and extremely fast, mail delivery has been virtually instant and the features they offer have remained far in advance of what my local-shopping friends have access to. Today, though, I suddenly faced my moment of truth. A series of interconnected programs I’ve been testing for the last couple of months suddenly stopped working. An hour of checking and I determined that the problem lay with a change made by the web host. I was pretty cross and immediately raised a ticket on their customer service system. Four minutes later I got a reply.
Jon,This is a configuration issue our developers have been tweaking since Wednesday. A new exploit was discovered and the security had to be tightened.
The issue here is that the content of your upload was rejected. The .mp3 was flagged and as a result the 403 was issued. I must send this to our developers so that they can adjust the rules.
I was extremely impressed, really amazed. Now another email has arrived, just under five hours after I told them about the problem.
Jon,We have permanently corrected the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you.
And he’s right (although can any problem really be permanently solved?) everything is working fine again. Amazing, and this is on a Saturday, mind you. Admittedly this was their mistake but even so, do you think I would have had this experience with a British company? Please, if I’m being unfair tell me. I’d love to hear about any amazing customer service anyone has had from a British company lately because I’ve got to tell you, it’s starting to depress me.
And why don’t I want to tell you their name? Because I’m worried that if everyone starts using them they might get overburdened, maybe the servers will slow down, maybe you’ll all be demanding customers who can’t track down your own problems. Resources could be wasted, motivation might be reduced, things could still go wrong, so no, I’m not telling. Wild horses and hemp rope won’t drag it out of me.
I don’t really subscribe to the revolutionary communist view of Industrial Relations but the history, both ancient and modern, of The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) does seem to cast a new light on Marx’s theories about the significance of the Ownership of the Means of Production. The “largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States” is built inside the renovated buildings of a nineteenth century factory that has dominated the small city of North Adams ever since it became a city. At one time, the factory employed roughly a quarter of the town’s population. Twice in its life it has closed down, giving the workers whose labour built it a stark choice between starving or moving on.
Last year MASS MoCA started building a huge installation by Christoph Büchel. Dozens of workers toiled to create the complicated re-constructions which characterise Büchel’s work. It was a demanding and expensive show which quickly became more costly and more complicated as the opening date in December approached. It didn’t open on time, the relationship between the artist and the gallery became adversarial and it started to seem that the show would never be finished. Having spent nearly half its annual visual arts budget on the show the museum looked like it might have nothing to show for all the effort. Once again it seemed like the workers in the Marshall Street factory were going to be denied the fruits of their labours.
I happened to be visiting MASS MoCA in February when absolutely everybody was talking about the show that would never open. The staff there were really upset and offended about what had happened. It was, to them, inexplicable and unforgivable. I was so intrigued that one evening I sneaked through a fire escape door marked No Entry at the back of one of the galleries and managed to creep up a staircase and into the gigantic, spooky mayhem of Building 5.
The New York Times does a better job of describing the show than I can possibly manage. Maybe my experience was enhanced by my paranoia about getting caught, which made me scuttle around in the shadows, trying to be as silent as I possibly could, but even in its unfinished state it was a mind-blowing installation that has haunted me ever since. It was easy to see why the museum were so keen to exhibit the work.
Last week MASS MoCA announced that they were going to court in an attempt to gain permission to show the materials that were collected during the construction of the show, without the consent of Christoph Büchel. The artist’s US lawyer, Donn Zaretsky, says that what they are attempting to show is not a work in progress but rather a distorted, modified version of what they imagine the final work may have looked like.
When I first heard about what MASS MoCA were planning on doing I thought “Good for them”. I have always found the gallery staff, from bosses to interns, to be incredibly easy to work with and utterly committed to doing everything possible to facilitate the work of their artists. I can’t imagine how somebody could fall out with them so disastrously. I also think that a big installation like this is inevitably a collaboration, unlike the paintings that Donn Zaretsky draws a parallel with. In such a collaboration it’s not fair for one party to attempt to veto the efforts of everyone else.
However, when I started considering how Christoph Büchel might feel about what was going on I became less certain. I started to wonder what happens to the relationship between artists and venues if the galleries reserve the right to exhibit any work in any form if they think that the artist is being unreasonable. Would I be happy working with that sort of threat hanging over me? Which takes me back to the political theory that I started off with. Maybe Christoph Büchel isn’t the top-hatted capitalist, denying the workers their natural right to gain from their own efforts. Perhaps he’s more like an exploited artisan, tossed aside and told that everyone’s expendable. All workers have the right to withdraw their labour as a last resort, even artists. Maybe Mr Büchel should organise a picket line, I’m sure he’d make fantastic placards.
PDF of Büchel’s March statement
Maverick Arts discusses the context for the story.
Coverage at the Boston Globe.
Martin Bromisky describes how the show looks now.
Discussion about Büchel’s motives at Modern Kicks.
Veiled Mum called over her five year old daughter and told her off for dancing about.
Afro-Caribbean Mum: Don’t you like her dancing?
VM: No, it’s not allowed in our religion.
AM: But she’s just playing around, she’s got lots of energy.
VM: I wouldn’t like her ever to become a dancer.
AM: Not even a ballet dancer?
VM: No, it’s not allowed in our religion.
Wikipedia had an article about the Rhodes Blood Libel on its front page a few days ago. This was one of those cases where a Jewish community was falsely accused of ritually murdering a Christian child, leading to horrible repercussions. Reading the article I was wondering whether such a thing could happen today and what can be done to avoid it.
The false allegations gained ground because the suspects confessed under torture. Of course we all know nowadays that people will say anything if you torture them enough. The tortured person becomes a megaphone for the views of the torturer and his bosses, who are inevitable revolting, crazy people. So torturing people becomes more a way of perpetuating prejudices and lies than of gaining useful information. This is worth bearing in mind as some governments seek to legitimise torture or even actively legalise it.
There is also the question of why on earth anyone would believe such ridiculous accusations in the first place. I think it was partly because the Jewish community lived so separately from the mainstream community. The bizarre rituals of Judaism aren’t in fact any weirder that the rituals of any religion but people had no way of becoming familiar with them because they were always carried out behind closed doors. When things are done in secret, in a mysterious language, they do take on a sinister aspect.
That obviously got me to thinking about the way in which some Muslims are trying to cut themselves off from the society I live in, with separate Islamic schools and all-concealing clothing. I can see why the atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that’s been generated by George Bush’s War On Terror would make people want to hide themselves away, but I think that reaction would be a big mistake. When people are suspecting your motives the answer is to patiently keep talking to them, not to run away.
The Books are my favourite band, they have been for some time now. I love the complexity and ingeniousness of their tracks; they manage to sound arty and detailed without being close or oppressive. You get the sense that they are writing in a light, airy space. It’s great music to listen to if you work with sound, perfectly produced.
Amanda Hadingue, one of the founding members of Stan’s Cafe, told me about Tears of Strangeness ages ago. I’m not sure if she invented the idea but I’ve never heard anyone outside the company using the phrase. It’s when you experience something that is so strange… well I don’t suppose I have to explain what it means, either you’ve experienced them or you haven’t.
Today I was searching around on the web for some contact details for Sue Killam, the Performing Arts Manager at MASS MoCA. I wanted to write her a letter thanking her for the amazing support and assistance she and her team provided when I was working there recently. Looking at photos of MASS MoCA and the city of North Adams reminded me of how much I grew to love the place during my stay. It’s an odd city, reminding me of Twin Peaks when I first arrived, but it really grows on you and I was feeling strangely sad and wistful until I came across an article that provoked the uncanny prickings of Tears of Strangeness. According to an article on iBerkshires.com, the second The Books album Lost and Safe was recorded in an old Victorian house in North Adams and according to Wikipedia, both members of the band are still living there! Man, that’s so freaky. I’ve been in the Radio Shack from where Nick Zammuto must have bought the components for his spoon boxes. Maybe they even came to see the show, maybe they liked it!
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